The general public really can’t tell the difference between a good filling and a great filling. They don’t know whether your crown margins are thirty microns or fifty microns. They just believe that all dentists do the same work.

They also assume that all Dental Offices know how to file insurance and keep things clean.

The only way the general public can really differentiate between one Dental Office and another is by how nicely they’re treated at those offices and the way they’re made to feel by the people who work there.

If you want your Dental Office to be known as *THE* Go-To Dentist in town then you need to be looking at how your office functions from the Customers’ Points of View, and not from the Office’s Point of View.

And sadly, there’s not many Dentists thinking like that…

Sure, there’s Dentists out there saying “Be nice here” and “Be nice there” to their team, but really, who’s looking at Dentistry *totally* from the patient’s point of view first and foremost, from the moment the patient enters the Dental Office, to the moment they leave, and all the befores and afters as well that are associated with that visit?

The answer?

Not very many….

One of the easiest ways of getting a big *DISCONNECT* from your patients is by failing to listen to them…

I mean, *REALLY* listening to them.

And it’s hard.

Sometimes as a Dentist we get so caught up in the day to day of what we’re doing with our regular patients, who we know, and our staff and team, who we know, and the things that we do routinely, day in and day out, that we know, that we sometimes fail to stop, and really wait to listen, to our NEW Patients, who we are yet to get to know….

And an opportunity can be really missed sometimes.

We’re all guilty of it.

I recall a young adult male patient last year that I saw as a New Patient, who I failed to connect with.

Yes sure, we connected, but in terms of his outcome that he expected from the consultation, I totally missed the mark, because my diagnosis of what was needed to straighten his teeth was not what he wanted to hear. [He wanted Invisalign to correct a skeletal crossbite]

And I totally missed the fact that I had totally missed “satisfying” all his concerns.

Now maybe I was just “busy” all the rest of the day?

I don’t remember how that appointment sat in my schedule…

But I wish that I could have jumped in my time machine and gone back in time to maybe do something different during that appointment.

The second major way that we fail to truly connect is that we talk in BIG words to people who have no real idea what on earth we’re talking about

We use “jargon” terms too often.

And jargon abbreviations.

We just slip back into the lingo…. and the patients sometimes have no real idea what the heck we’re saying.

We ask our Dental Assistant:

“I need an appointment for an extirpation.”

“Can you book me a crown prep on the 11?”

“And then an issue two weeks later.”

And then she goes with the patient to the front and says the exact same thing to the appointment scheduler…

And our poor old patient, who may or may not have been standing on their head for the last half hour, and now is standing up looking over a high counter talking to a woman sitting down with a computer keyboard and a screen in front of her that the poor old patient is really dying to see but cannot….

And we’re asking our poor old patient to hand over her money by the hundreds, or thousands, in what’s NOT really a comfortable environment…

She’s disoriented by the lying down and standing up…

She’s disoriented by all the jargon she’s just been force-fed…

Sure, our Office design functions well from our point of view.

Sure, we know we told the patient what we’re going to be doing.

We know…

But did they *REALLY* get it?

Or are they just nodding their heads to be polite…

The Movie, The Shawshank Redemption, is narrated in the third person by Red, where we watch the life journey of Andy Dufresne thru Red’s eyes.

And maybe that’s what we need to do in our practices, and our Dental Offices?

Maybe we need to have an industry outsider take a good look at what we’re doing, from a fly on the wall perspective?

Because I don’t think The Shawshank Redemption would have been as great a movie and as memorable a movie as it was, as it is, as it will always be, if it had just been made or written without that third person narration

The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.

Email me at david@theupe.com

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